Feb 06, 2016 - ROS on the Orange Pi 2
I’m once again back to building small robots; and the ARM board of the day is the Orange Pi 2, so I’m going to install Ubuntu and ROS on it.
I had a 32GB microSD card around, so I used that. The robot variant of ROS requires about 900MB to install, the desktop variant requires about 1.5GB, and I recommend another several GB for logs and work space. I don’t recommend a microSD card smaller than 16GB.
Since there are ROS binaries (debs) for Ubuntu and they usually work on the Ubunntu variants, I started by installing Lubuntu on my Orange Pi 2, from the Orange Pi download page, and then installing it according to the Orange Pi Quickstart Guide.
Once the OS was copied to the SD card, my Orange Pi 2 booted right up.
Since I have lots of FTDI cables, and very few spare HDMI monitors, so I did my setup over the serial debug port, but these commands should work just as well if you’re using a keyboard and monitor.
Change the passwords
The default username and password is orangepi; start by logging in and changing the password (the default root password is orangepi; change that too)
Resize the disk
Resize the partition. Run parted:
$ parted
Show the partition list:
(parted) print
There should be two partitions; 1 should be a boot partition, about 64MB; the second should be the main partition, about 3.6G
Resize the second partition to use the whole disk:
(parted) resizepart 2 32GB
Close parted:
(parted) quit
Reboot to load the updated partition table:
$ reboot
Log in as root again, resize the filesystem:
$ resize2fs /dev/mmblk0p2
Now you should have the full capacity of your microSD card available.
Set up WiFi
If your network needs a passphrase, generate the hash for it using wpa_passphrase:
$ wpa_passphrase Robonet
yournetworkpassword
Then set up your /etc/network/interfaces to auto-join the network:
auto wlan1
iface wlan1 inet dhcp
pre-up rfkill unblock 1
wpa-ssid Robonet
wpa-psk KEYKEYKEY # replace with the key from wpa_passphrase
And finally reboot to activate the new wifi configuration.
(if you don’t feel like rebooting, you can restart network-manager and do ifup wlan1)
I also had to disable network-manager, and reconfigure eth0 with allow-hotplug in /etc/network/interfaces
Install ROS
Install ROS by following the ROS for Ubuntu ARM install guide
Follow-up
The default Lubuntu build doesn’t include FTDI drivers and many other drivers are probably missing, too.
Hokuyos, FTDI cables, some wireless adapters, and some other devices probably won’t work.
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